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What then is the veritable nature of Number?
Is it an accompaniment upon each substance, something seen in the
things as in a man we see one man, in a being one being and in
the total of presentations the total of number?
But how explain the dyad and triad? How comes the total to be
unitary and any particular number to be brought under unity? The
theory offers a multiplicity of units, and no number is reducible
to unity but the simple "one." It might be suggested that a dyad
is that thing- or rather what is observed upon that thing- which
has two powers combined, a compound thing related to a unity: or
numbers might be what the Pythagoreans seem to hold them in their
symbolic system in which Justice, for example, is a Tetrad: but
this is rather to add the number, a number of manifold unity like
the decad, to the multiplicity of the thing which yet is one
thing. Now it is not so that we treat the ten things; we bring
them together and apply the figure ten to the several items. Or
rather in that case we say ten, but when the several items form a
unity we say decad. This would apply in the Intellectual as in
the sensible.
But how then can number, observed upon things, rank among Real
Beings?
One answer might be that whiteness is similarly observed upon
things and yet is real, just as movement is observed upon things
and there is still a real existence of movement. But movement is
not on a par with number: it is because movement is an entity
that unity can be observed upon it. Besides, the kind of real
existence thus implied annuls the reality of number, making it no
more than an attribute; but that cannot be since an attribute
must exist before it can be attributed; it may be inseparable
from the subject but still must in itself be something, some
entity as whiteness is; to be a predicate it must be that which
is to be predicated. Thus if unity is observed in every subject,
and "one man" says more than "man's oneness being different from
the manness and common to all things- then this oneness must be
something prior to man and to all the rest: only so can the unity
come to apply to each and to all: it must therefore be prior also
to even movement, prior to Being, since without unity these could
not be each one thing: of course what is here meant is not the
unity postulated as transcending Being but the unity predicable
of the Ideas which constitute each several thing. So too there is
a decad prior to the subject in which we affirm it; this prior
would be the decad absolute, for certainly the thing in which the
decad is observed is not that absolute.
Is this unity, then, connate and coexistent to the Beings?
Suppose it coexistent merely as an accidental, like health in
man, it still must exist of itself; suppose it present as an
element in a compound, there must first exist unity and the unity
absolute that can thus enter into composition; moreover if it
were compounded with an object brought into being by its agency
it would make that object only spuriously a unity; its entry
would produce a duality.
But what of the decad? Where lies the need of decad to a thing
which, by totalling to that power, is decad already?
The need may be like that of Form to Matter; ten and decad may
exist by its virtue; and, once more, the decad must previously
exist of its own existence, decad unattached.
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